S-Rank Blog Posts #2: Afro Samurai
By Phr4nk0 1 Comments
So my last entry was quite long, these hopefuly shouldn't be that long anymore (though I make no promises). Last time I had a bit of a intro with a lot of backstory about my RPG habits. What we have here this time is a straight up Hack-n-Slash. Afro Samurai didn't recieve a lot of love but I actually quite enjoyed it. While it's not some original masterpiece it's got style and some good ideas.
A lot of people have put Afro down because of it's repetitive combat, which is something I thought most of the way through my first playthrough. I basically button mashed X all the way through 5 of the 6 hours it took me to beat it on Number II difficulty. Yeah it's a short game. It's in the second playthrough that things started to get good. Should someone have to play through the game a second time before they get presented with some decent combat? No. It's stupid that it's rolled out in this way. The reason for this is the level up system.
You level up by the amount of blood spilled. The more bloody cuts/dismemberments you pull off the more blood spills the faster your bar fills. Simple, badass, effective but ultimately maybe to the games downfall. I was a bit puzzled at first because you just get these level up messages and nothing else. Coming straight from Dragon Age I was thinking what do I do? Do I put stats somewhere? Did I unlock something? Did I get more health, more focus? It doesn't tell you what you got or anything beside the fact that you leveled up. What I eventually realised is each time you level you recieve a new combo/move. The shit thing is that they've got 50 levels to fill so it's like level 1 - unlock X,X combo, level 2 unlock Y,Y combo, level 3 unlock X,X,X combo etc all the way up to near the end of the game on your first playthrough you're still unlocking like X,X,X Y,Y,Y X,X,X and Y,Y,Y X,X,X Y,Y,Y. Basic combos that should be open to you from the start, maybe if they were the game wouldn't give of the shitty first impression it makes combat wise.
Most of the best moves are attached to the collectables. You miss one of them on your playthrough you cant use that move until you go back and find it. Atleast you have an incentive to find things and level up but it seems like they've banked on the fact that people are so into achievements that they'll play it a second time to get to the good things. Completionist achievement requires you the beat it on both difficulties, and by the time you're two thirds of the way through your second playthrough you've finally maxed out you're level and have access to some decent moves/combos that you need when facing the later groups of enemies. The last two levels have some hard ass fights in there.
The good first impression it gives however is it's style. It's got heaps. If you've watched the anime then you know whats going on here. Afro's got some of the best Cel Shading I've seen. It's got Samuel L. Jackson being Samuel L. Jackson. It's got the ability to cut dudes however you want in slowmotion. Get in focus, charge up your horizontal or vertical slash right, aim for the head, arms, feet where ever and let fly. Body parts go flying, blood shoots everywhere it's fantastic. Now obviously when your cutting up 100's of dudes a level it's not like you stay amazed at some slicing forever but the fact that it dynamically slices exactly where you aimed leads to some funny results when you just end up slicing willy-nilly. Dudes tryed to dodge me and ended up with their face sliced off Equilibrium style. Try to roll away and ended up without any buttocks, tryed to jump and got the soles of their feet sliced off, once I somehow managed to only slice a guys knee caps off. Sometimes you just look around afterwards and wonder what kind of horrible position did that poor ninja have to contort himself into for me to be able to slice the front of his toes, the back of his hamstrings and 2cm of the top of his skull off in one swing. It's always entertaining.
All that mixed with Hip-Hop. If you havn't seen Afro Samurai I'd recommend you do. I havn't seen the movie but the 5 part series is well worth it. It's basically old school Fuedal Japan (Samurais, Ninjas, Decapitations and Dismemberment, Japanese Style and Cliches) with Hip-Hop culture (Swearing, Rap, RZA, The baddest Mofo on the Planet Samuel L. Jackson, Afros, Cell Phones) and basically anything else badass they can think off (Guns, Rocket Launchers, Robots etc) It's nuts. It's like Wu-Tang Clans wet dream, It's awesome. Speaking of the Wu-Tang Clan, the RZA is incharge of the music in the game and it's awesome as expected. There's only a couple of tracks with rapping in it, and while they are good they are repeated one or two too many times in an already short game.
Most of the achievements you'll get on your way through, you'll be cutting dudes in so many weird ways that achievements related to that will pop randomly. Achievements related to blood spilled will come up randomly, a bunch of story related ones pop when you beat each chapter, collect every collectable, you know, the usual. There are two big achievements Completionist for 200 gamerscore and The Number One for 100 gamerscore. Completionist requires you to beat both difficulties in the story. So unlike other games you can't just playthrough it on the hardest and get it, which I doubt is even possible with the lack of skills you would have unlocked anyway. And The Number 1 is for unlocking every skill, which will require you to have played the game atleast 1 and a half times anyway and found all the collectables. So most of the achievements are all tied to each other which means doing one thing is always getting you closer to another aswell, which is nice.
The ones that stand out from the crowd and by far the most frustrating are the Body Part Poker achievements (Kunoichi Suicide Queens in particular). Body Part Poker is a mini game you can play inside the combat. Every so often your friend Ninja Ninja (he's a Ninja called Ninja I think, or maybe his full name is actually Ninja Ninja...) appears somewhere during a combat situation and by running up to him you can start playing Body Part Poker (BPP from now on). BPP is played by hacking of enemy body parts to form poker hands. Enemy types become the suit of the card, and body parts become values. If you create a proper hand you are rewarded with health and stamina. For eample if you hack of 3 enemies legs you create a "Lower Pair", but if you hack of the legs of 3 of the same type of enemies you get a "Lower Pair Flush" which will reward you more stamina. You can get 3 heads, 3 hands, 3 legs, any mix of heads, hands and legs as long as they are the same enemy type for a flush, a head, hand and legs will result in a straight and for the best hand possible; a head, hand and legs of the one enemy type for a Straight Flush. BPP isn't explained in great detail in game or the manual so you've got a step up from reading this.
All BPP achievements require you to get a Straight Flush from each different enemy type in the game (Ronin, Ninja, Android, Kunoichi and Samurai). Seeing as these are the hardest achievements in the game I'll post a bit of a guide here while it's still fresh in my mind.
Ronin Straight Flush: By far the easiest. They are the easiest enemy, and hardly dodge/block. You just use a horizontal focus slash for everything here. Aim for the head, middle of the body and legs and you have it. If you're not to good at aiming wait until you unlock the pounce move. After performing a properly timed block (RT) press A to pounce on the and press X to instantly chop of their heads. There's many opportunities in the game to get this.
Ninja Straight Flush
: These dodge a bit which makes things slightly harder but at the same time it also leads to some lucky hits sometimes. You can usually perform the Pounce move on the ninja aswell so do that for the head and horizontal slice the legs/arms. They jump or duck when you go for it so aim up or down and you'll easily get the legs. If you're having trouble for the arms you can always sweep them (LT+B) then vertical strike. They normally jump the sweep so just stay in focus and wait for them to nearly land and sweep them again. Lots of opportunities for this one aswell.Android Straight Flush:
These are easy, they have longer limbs than the others so much easier to aim for. Just use the above techniques and you'll get them. Plenty of opportunities for this too.Kunoichi Straight Flush: This is the hardest one to get in my oppinion. Kunoichi are basically better ninjas, they are stronger and dodge more. They are always female and wear the yellow/tan clothes. What makes this one hard is not just the fact that they dodge, but the only encounters you have with them are in the middle of battles with other enemy types and they just love to get in your way. I did this on the snowy bridge level. Theres two other areas you can go for this the level before and after I think but both of these spots require you to fight a bunch of other guys before you get to them and when you fail and have to redo those fights 10 or 20 times it gets old fast. So pick the bridge level, turn around and find a bear behind a rock down the stairs (don't get ther collectable and you wont have to fight the guys that come down) then run back up and onto the bridge, wait for the god damn annoying cut scene with the god damn slow talking goliath retard every god damn time then activate BPP and grab the bear on the bridge this will give you full focus which allows you to go into Over Focus. Run past a couple of ninja and hit LB to get into Over Focus, position yourself infront of one of the Kunoichi and don't move and press Y for a slash. Somewhere around 50% of the time you manage to get a head. This is the only way I could possibly get a head that wasn't 100% luck. Sometimes doing this will net you a hand for some reason, if that happens go the the next one and try again. We want a head, if you get a hand and the head then thats a bonus and you are pretty much home free. So you've got your head, now run away and mash on some ninja or whatever to get some more focus then you want to sweep the Kunoichi using the double sweep trick outlined in the Ninja Straight Flush section and do a perfect verticle slice while tilting it all the way to the right this will get you the hand with some degree of consistancy. Now the legs are just a properly aimed horizontal slash away. Unless some motherfucker gets in your way and you manage to accidentally lop off something of theirs. Which happened to me, if you mess up (and you will, lots of times, although far less than me hopefully now you've got this sweet guide) cuss like a sailor with Torettes, punch something, glare at your Xbox like you're about to commit a hate crime on it and then jump off the bridge and try again. After about 2 hours of trying I finally got this. (Thanks to Molloy2006's Guide mixed with some other hints I found using google)
Samurai Straight Flush:
is gotten easily at the end of the snowy bridge level. You have to fight 5 of them and no other enemies. What makes these guys anoying is they always block your attacks, just keep trying and if something messes up jump off the bridge to restart. You'll get it eventually, just time your blocks and you'll be fine. These guys block a lot but atleast they're not flipping around everywhere.Thats it. In summary I'd recommend Afro Samurai to anyone that likes a good Hack-n-Slash. It may not be on the level of a Ninja Gaiden but it's style and unique twists make up for it. The camera is a bit shitty (go into options and invert the x axis, trust me) but only rarely was I blaming it for my failures. It's got something to show, sweet music, the achievements are pretty easy besides one or two and I S-Ranked it in around 12 hours game time (though I don't know if that stat counts deaths). Next up I think I'll be doing Bionic Commando.